BootDrive for Arduino

Announcing the formal release of BootDrive for Arduino. If you’ve been reading the blog, you know that I’ve been working with Justin Shaw of Wyolum labs to enable their I2SD (Arduino clone with a micro-sd card) to bootload a program onto another Arduino. After battling several issues, mostly related to porting avrdude code to the Arduino (assumptions about infinite memory, etc!) it’s working well enough people can fool around with it.

Right now the code looks for a single file (“program.hex”) and waits 5 sec and then blasts it into the target arduino. Details about setting up to try this yourself follow the video.

Here’s a demo of it in action:

If you’d like to try this with a couple of Arduinos, you’ll also need an SD card (or micro-sd) interface such as the Adafruit Micro-SD breakout. This board is great because it has onboard 3.3v conversion so it’s safe to use with 5V (stock) Arduinos. Download the code from github: https://github.com/osbock/Baldwisdom/tree/master/BootDrive
or a zipped version here

The .hex file is the final output of the compilation which is then uploaded to the board. During a “Verify” the .hex file is written to /tmp (on Mac and Linux) or \Documents and Settings\<USER>\Local Settings\Temp (on Windows). During upload, it’s written to the applet sub-directory of the sketch directory (which you can open with the “Show Sketch Folder” item in the Sketch menu)

Note on Windows7, the base directory is \users\<USER> \appdata\local\Temp\build<some bunch of numbers>.tmp\<sketchname>.cpp.hex

Note that if you want to load an Arduino other than UNO, you’ll need to change the baud rate. You can find that in “hardware/arduino/boards.txt” in the arduino directory. This won’t work on MEGA based Arduinos as they use the stk500v2 protocol (thanks westfw!)